Music career

Moroder made his first steps in music in Berlin, Germany by releasing a few singles under the name “Giorgio” beginning in 1966, singing in Italian (as George, to explain his German accent), Spanish, English, and German. He came to prominence in 1969, when his recording “Looky Looky”, released on Ariola Records, was awarded a gold disc in October 1970.Often collaborating with lyricist Pete Bellotte, Moroder had a number of hits in his own name including “Son of My Father” in 1972 before releasing the synthesizer-driven From Here to Eternity, a notable chartbuster in 1977, and in the following year releasing “Chase“, the theme from the film Midnight Express. These songs achieved some chart success in the UK, the U.S., and across Europe, and everywhere disco-mania was spreading. The full movie score for Midnight Express won him his first Academy Award for best film score in 1978. In 1979, Moroder released his album E=MC². Text on the album’s cover stated that it was the “first electronic live-to-digital album.” He also released three albums between 1977-1979 under the name Munich Machine.

Moroder also won two of his three Grammy Awards for “Flashdance”: Best Album Of Original Score Written For A Motion Picture Or A Television Special and Best Instrumental Composition, for the track “Love Theme from Flashdance”.

In 1984, Moroder compiled a new restoration and edit of the famous silent filmMetropolis and provided a contemporary soundtrack to the film. This soundtrack includes seven pop music tracks from Pat Benatar, Jon Anderson, Adam Ant, Billy Squier, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler and Freddie Mercury. He also integrated the old-fashioned intertitles into the film as subtitles as a means of improving continuity, and he also played the film at a rate of 24 frames per second. Since the original speed was unknown this choice was controversial. Known as the “Moroder version”, it sparked debate among film buffs, with outspoken critics and supporters of the film falling into equal camps.

Not much needs to be said about Kraftwerk really as im pretty sure everyone who knows anything about music will know exactly what electronic music today owes Kraftwerk. I doubt there is a BBoy in the world who wont get amped hearing this on a floor or a record enthusiast that wouldn’t have this in their collection.

Along with being one of the releases that shaped electronic music, Tour also has its small spot in clubbing/rave history here in Sydney too. I have heard from a few people over the years about watching in awe as local DJ Stephen Allkins (Love Tattoo), regularly sample & played this back & forth with Salt & Peppers Push It at Sydneys infamous R.A.T parties at the Horden in the late 1980’s.

Check this info on RAT parties in Sydney from Powerhouse museum online;

During the 1980s in Sydney’s inner-east, a series of more than 35 parties organised by the Recreational Arts Team (RAT) formed a key element of an emerging subculture. The core of the self-styled Recreational Arts Team was Jac Vidgen, Billy Yip and Reno Dal. Vidgen, an energetic party-thrower who had come to Sydney from Brisbane, became the de facto promoter and organiser of these so-called RAT parties. Yip was an artist with a wildly creative imagination who developed well co-ordinated themes and design concepts for the parties. His striking graphic concepts were applied to posters, fliers, badges and banners. Reno Dal was the team’s original technical designer and producer, who started the events with Vidgen and Yip in 1983 and remained involved until 1986. Mark Taylor was the technical producer for the peak period 1986-1990, while Wayne Gait-Smith was technical designer.Vidgen threw his first public party for 200 guests at a rat-infested house on Cleveland St on 2 October 1983, because his own private parties had become too large and expensive. He had no idea he was setting in train a phenomenon that led to a multitude of dance parties every year. Each party had a special name, usually conceived by Billy Yip, incorporating the word ‘rat’ in its title. The first official RAT party, titled ‘Ratsurrect’ and advertised through word-of-mouth, was held at the Bondi Pavilion on Easter Sunday, 22 April 1984. The early parties, particularly ‘Ratizm’ at the Paddington Town Hall (April 1985), created a buzz, attracting an inner-city party-going crowd that included heterosexual bohemians as well as gay men and drag queens. RAT parties typically had audio-visual presentations, bizarre props, party drugs, innovative lighting, underground cabaret groups, the best DJs in town and unusual live performances by people like Martin Harsono and Simon Reptile, who performed at most of these events.

What began as a creative exercise became a business. In 1987 Vidgen registered Recreational Arts Team Pty Ltd as a company. The events became larger, and were no longer exclusive eastern suburbs affairs where it was necessary to know the right people to obtain a ticket. The parties became famous for their spectacular entertainment and celebrity guests. ‘A Ratty New Year’, held on New Year’s Eve 1988 and featuring a 4am live performance by Grace Jones, was so popular that it filled both the Hordern Pavilion and the Royal Hall of Industries. The audiences ranged from 200 to 14,000 guests, with budgets from $5,000 to $400,000. However Vidgen’s motivation was not financial gain. Business was risky, profits were slim, and money made on one party was frequently lost on the next one. Vidgen described himself as ‘an event producer committed to celebration’ (Sydney Morning Herald 13/9/89).

RAT parties provided a venue for a circle of creative people to express themselves on a larger scale than had previously been available, providing a stepping stone for some to move to other levels of expression. Billy Yip is now a painter of fine art. Tobin Saunders, who is now better known as Vanessa Wagner, used to help on the decor team and performed at many of the parties with his dance group. Other contributors were the visual artist Anthony Babicci, the entertainer Ignatius Jones, and Tim Gruchy, who was responsible for much of the video production and recording at the events, particularly in the later years. The parties were vividly documented in photographs by William Yang.

The RAT parties were forerunners of the dance parties and raves of the 1990s. In the early 1980s pub rock was still the mainstream, and dance music was an underground phenomenon. Any music that utilised electronic instruments other than guitars was regarded as weird or avant-garde. RAT party enthusiasts eschewed rock, preferring recorded electronic music and dance music provided by pioneering DJs like Tim Ritchie, Robert Racic and Pee Wee Ferris.

Spearheaded by these DJs, Australian dance music took off in the 1980s. Ignored by major record labels, the dance movement followed the same path as the punk ethic: do-it-yourself. Following Vidgen’s lead, competing independent promoters booked nights at tired old venues like the Hordern Pavilion and transformed them into vibrant, packed palaces. Sydney’s gay community, in particular, took to dance parties. As well as RAT parties, the Mardi Gras, Sweatbox and Bacchanalia are now spoken of as some of the best parties held, featuring DJ sets from the likes of Ritchie, Racic, Ferris, Stephen Allkins and Paul Holden. The buzz of these parties spread to the UK with that country’s top DJs keen to take part. Warehouses emerged, some becoming the foundation of local rave culture. By the end of the 1980s parties flourished all around the country, with promoters booking a constant flow of influential overseas DJs such as Paul Oakenfold. While established rock venues suffered from lack of attendance, dance parties were frequently sold out.

The RAT parties altered Sydney’s night life, starting a craze for giant dance parties that lasted in to the 1990s. They provided a diverse range of entertainment based on visual and aural stimulation, provided a creative outlet for talented people and set the tone and style of Australian dance music culture.

Picnic Social Warehouse party feat LOVEFINGERS (nyc)

Saturday, 09 January 2010

psychedelic. warehouse. disco. party. could four words be any sweeter? after the Sydney festival first night blow-out, picnic’s here to save you with some serious fun times in our inner city warehouse, just 10 minutes away from martin place.

special guest LOVEFINGERS (blackdisco/ny) – hipster hero and crate digger, party rocker and all round awesome bro – has flown over especially and is doing a 3hr set for us. he’s the lock of the week for picnic – solid jams on blackdisco, just signed to modular and is a favourite of dj harvey and rub n tug and garth and metro area and loads of others.

getting down to business are our local jocks, THE LOIN BROTHERS, alongside everyone’s favourite PERFECT SNATCH, STEELE BONUS and picnic head honchos/all round party animals KALI and VIVI, and your host MC GAFF E.

tickets are $15 presale and no more than $20 on the door.

full picnic turbosound system installed on the night!

—

Andrew Hogge aka Lovefingers needs little introduction amongst the global disco elite, his world famous lovefingers.org has had a undeniable impact, on the burgeoning eclectic dance scene of today and has enabled him to bring his eccentric taste and unique DJ style on tours throughout the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

A Los Angeles native, Andrew and collaborator Nitedog have been hosting the standalone monthly event Blackdisco Social Club since 2001 which have included guests like LCD Soundsystem, Prins Thomas, Rub’n’Tug and many more before heading off to New York where he resides today. Lovefingers and Nitedog, also founded the top notch disco re-edit label Blackdisco well know for its discerning tastes, Black Disco releases have found there way into the bags of top jocks like Harvey, James Murphy and their debut 12″ was recognized as #2 in Phonica’s Top 10 Disco of 2008 as well as Tim Sweeney’s Best of 2008 Beats in Space.

Lovefingers’ left-field sensibilities have also led him into the art world including performances at PS1 MoMA’s Summer Warm-Up, Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, sculptor Eduardo Sarabia’s Salon Aleman installation at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, avant-garde designer Henrik Vibskov and fashion icon Diane Pernet. Keep an eye and ear out for new projects dropping this year, The Stallions a production duo with long time cohort and DJ partner Lee Douglas and singer Findlay Brown and the kick off of Loverfingers own original imprint ESP Inst.

Links & More Info:

Love Fingers Interview

Chances are you already know about the Lovefingers website, quite possibly the best site at the moment for downloading rare unearthed music from the past 30-40 years. What you probably don’t know is that the man behind the site, Andrew Hogge, is one of the most friendly and laid back guys going around. A native Californian who currently resides in Brooklyn, he’ll probably tell you himself that he’s lazy. However he still manages to hold down a full time job and at the same time run two record labels, update his website with daily ‘fingertracks’ and mixes, work on his own music as one half of production duo The Stallions, party with the energy of an 18 year old, and tour the world djing. Recently he even became a father. Steele Bonus caught up with Lovefingers a month outside of his second trip down under.

Steele Bonus: Tell us about your origins in music. How did you come about collecting records and djing?

Andrew Lovefingers: I grew up in a musical home, mum was a music teacher and we played and sang together from as far back as I can remember. I started playing drums when I was seven or eight. It was pretty cool, after I first set up the kit my mum jumped on and dropped some beats, I couldn’t believe it! As for records, the first was a huge box of my dad’s 45s, mostly Beatles and Beach Boys. My first purchased records were probably Run DMC and Zeppelin. I got into metal, punk and hardcore later and started compulsively collecting 7″s which led to everything else.

SB: Did you ever play in bands? Do you miss jamming with a band?

AL: Yeah a handful of punk bands in high school, and later some stoner rock bands, no need to name any of them… but I guess the last band I played in was Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Yeah I haven’t had a drum kit for a while, I need one badly!

SB: So you’ve been working on a bunch of tracks lately with Lee Douglas. You guys also travel and dj together a fair bit. How did this partnership come about?

AL: We actually grew up in the same area and hung around the same punk kids, and have always had a lot of mutual friends. Funny now we also live a block from each other. I dunno, we just started hanging out a lot and listening to records all the time. So it was just inevitable that we started laying down tracks. I was asked by Findlay Brown to remix a song for his new album, so it was our first real project after a lot of talk. Then Findlay was really happy with the remix and his label asked us to produce some original material for him in the studio, and it ended up being a super great collaboration. Now we’re remixing a handful more artists and working on an album together. And since it seemed like we had to make up a name we are calling ourselves The Stallions.

SB: You made the move from LA to NYC a couple of years back. Did the music scene in NYC influence this decision? Do you think the music/club scene in NYC is all it’s cracked up to be? Are there any djs, bands or producers in NYC that you think the rest of the world needs to know about?

AL: I’ve always loved NYC but moving there had nothing to do with music. It was more work related really. But I’m a million times happier with the music scene in NYC than LA. I grew up in LA and it was just time for a change. Not to talk bad on LA, it’s a great place, and full of great people (despite the reputation). The music scene in NYC has always been amazing, but it’s by no means some disco-laden wonderland. There is a small pool of djs and record freaks and we all go to each other’s parties. It’s actually a super tough place to play in right now, money is low and people are jaded, but we still have fun. Underground parties are always where it’s at. I can’t really think of anything new in New York that people need to know about, TBD is the jam and also my buddy Speculator has a new label called Willy T… his release for Hunee is dope.
SB: Djing has taken you to play gigs at plenty of different locations around the globe. Any of them stand out as being the most memorable? Any crazy stories you feel like sharing?

AL: I love Turkey. I went to this little beach town in southern Turkey this summer and it was just amazing. Girls dancing in the knee high water under a full moon til the sun rose. Yeah of course when you are out all night weird things and people are involved but no real standouts. It’s all a blur. Just really awesome to meet such cool people and real music freaks all over the place! Stallions just played a fantastic gig last night in Stockholm and we’re on to Berlin tomorrow. Later in the week we’re over to Serbia to play in Belgrade, that’s really got me excited!

SB: Lets talk about your site. I have heard that you are going to stop once you reach 1000 tracks. It’s currently up there in the nine hundreds right? There mustn’t be long to go. What will happen when you hit 1000?

AL: Yeah maybe 30 something more to go. Not sure what will happen at 1000 but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make it a radio station. Not sure. It’s really a long mix, and a lot of tracks are totally specific to the time they were posted, but if you listen to the catalogue in its entirety it’s the best, so I might just make it stream. I wish there was a way to package the 1000 song mix but it would end up being a ridiculously large box set.

SB: I think lots of people are going to miss the updates. Especially after recently similar ‘track of the day’ type sites Bumrocks and Dream Chimney have shut down. Do you think it is a bit of an end of an era?

AL: Let’s just say that these specific sites you mentioned are the cream. I feel like Bumrocks, Dream Chimney and my site have accomplished something pretty cool, but honestly they’re kinda the only ones I pay attention to. The point is to promote great music and artists and get their music out there, but not to replace the actual records. That’s why the files are not high bit rate, its just to sample and then you need to go out to the record store, or at least the online record store. There is too much at your fingertips these days and it’s really overwhelming. So easy to get lost in the computer and its much better to get in, get out and get on with your day.

SB: Any plans to follow on with a different project? Or are you just looking forward to a break?

AL: Yes my new project is my new son Jaspar! I can’t think of anything more rewarding than listening and playing music with him. He’s got his favourites already, and he’s only a month old!

SB: There’s been a lot of hype, mostly taking place on the internet, about a resurgence in ‘cosmic disco’ music. Have you noticed much of a change in the popularity for this kind of music over the last few years in regards to the interest in your djing and your site?

AL: Meh, buzz words I guess. I mean the sub-genre thing is quite boring to me. It’s like when people put mixed styles of music together it’s all of a sudden “cosmic”. That’s not at all what I think of as cosmic. It’s a vibe not a genre. Unless I guess you’re referring to Baldelli’s classic jams from that era, which I really love, but mixing it all up is the way I like it and I’d never consider anything I do cosmic.

SB: So you are coming down under for the new year and some of January right? It’s been a long time coming and almost didn’t happen. Are you excited? Where are you playing?

AL: Yeah man I’m super stoked! Playing at The Toff on New Years Eve and at the Picnic party in Sydney the next week… a handful of other parties as well, I’ll post ‘em all on my site soon. Will be super cool to hang out with all you guys again, and especially to get a second shot at summer!

SB: So tell us about this new label you are starting up, the ESP Institute. What sort of stuff are you going to be putting out? Did you start it with a certain kind of music or certain acts in mind to release? How will it be different from your other label Blackdisco?

AL: Blackdisco is just about servicing djs and the dancefloor, it’s all edits and rework of songs for that specific use. ESP Institute is new music. Totally open minded beautiful sounds. Lots of great things from friends in Japan as well. My wife and I have also started a children’s clothing label under the ESP Institute called ESPno.1… Other things will follow and hopefully a boutique one day.

SB: Run us through some of the releases you’ve got coming up on the two labels.

AL: For Blackdisco, I will do another edit 12″ at some point but things that are for sure are a 12″ from Thriftcotheque (Eddie Ruscha of Laughing Light Of Plenty) and a 12″ from Justin Vandervolgen (TBD, Try and Find Me). The debut release from ESP Institute is Journey To The Centre Of The Sun by Sombrero Galaxy (which is two good buddies Tako and Jonny Nash) with a remix on the b-side by The Stallions. It’s out end of January. After that is a release by Chee Shimizu of Discosession. A super deep promo mix CD will be out first and probably free with the first shipped 12″s. The rest will be sold and the profits will all go to benefit music programs for children. The artwork for ESP is also going to be great, Mario Hugo is doing the whole package and he’s an amazing NYC artist.

SB: On your Blackdisco label you recently put out an edit by a guy from Brisbane – Julien Love. Julien is a very talented guy, but is still relatively unknown around these parts. How did it come about that you ended up putting out his music?

AL: A friend of mine played me his edit of The Jacksons and I just had to contact him to let it come out on Blackdisco. He’s sent me heaps of super fantastic edits and hopefully we’ll do another 12″ soon. He’s a great dude and everyone should fly him over for parties. Also check his music videos on Youtube, total dopeness.

SB: Thanks man, one more question, now that you have the responsibility of being a dad do you think you’ll slow down on going out partying till the wee hours of the morning?
AL: Everything is OK in moderation.

Lovefingers plays at Melbourne’s the Toff In Town on December 31 amongst other shows.

IT was at a party in 1970 that Ralf Hütter first glimpsed the potential power of the Man Machine. Kraftwerk, the avant-garde musical group he had founded that year with Florian Schneider in Düsseldorf, Germany, was playing a concert at the opening of an art gallery, a typical gig at the time. Trying to channel the energy of the Detroit bands it admired, like the Stooges and MC5, the duo had augmented its usual arsenal of Mr. Schneider’s flute and Mr. Hütter’s electric organ with a tape recorder and a little drum machine, and they were whipping the crowd into a frenzy with loops of feedback and a flurry of synthetic beats.

As the show climaxed, Mr. Hütter recalled: “I pressed some keys down on my keyboard, putting some weight down on the keys, and we left the stage. The audience at the party was so wild, they kept dancing to the machine.”

Thus began a careerlong obsession with the fusion of man and technology. It would take four more years (and three largely instrumental records of electro-acoustic improvisation) before Kraftwerk heralded the coming of electronic pop on its landmark 1974 album “Autobahn,” and another four years before the members proclaimed themselves automatons on “The Robots,” the band’s de facto theme song from 1978’s “The Man-Machine” album. But even in 1970 the hum of what Mr. Hütter calls electrodynamics was buzzing in his veins.

Few bands have done more to promote that once incongruous concept than Kraftwerk. Though its image shifted over the years from conservatory longhairs to Weimar-era dandies to stylized mannequin machines, it consistently provided a blueprint for the circuitry of modern pop music. David Bowie, an early adapter, channeled the band’s chilly vibes for his late ’70s “Berlin Trilogy,” and in the early 1980s synth pop groups like Human League and Depeche Mode followed suit.

Kraftwerk also became the unlikely godfather of American hip-hop and black electronic dance music, inspiring pioneers in the South Bronx and Detroit. Today Kraftwerk’s resonance can be heard in works as varied as Radiohead and the Auto-Tuned hip-hop of Kanye West and T-Pain.

“Kraftwerk were a huge influence on the early hip-hop scene, and they basically invented electro, which has had a huge influence on contemporary R&B and pop,” the techno artist Moby said. “Kraftwerk are to contemporary electronic music what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are to contemporary rock music.”

Yet 35 years after “Autobahn” Kraftwerk remains relatively anonymous, thanks largely to a carefully crafted cloak of secrecy, one that an hourlong phone conversation last month with Mr. Hütter from Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio outside Düsseldorf failed to penetrate significantly. On topics ranging from the band’s creative hibernation of the last quarter-century (only two albums of new material since 1981’s “Computer World”) to Mr. Schneider’s departure from the group late last year, Mr. Hütter was pleasant but revealed little. “It’s important for me that the music speak for itself,” he said.

This month the music should do just that with the release of “The Catalogue” (Astralwerks/EMI), a boxed set of newly remastered versions of the band’s last eight albums, beginning with “Autobahn” and including all of the records with the so-called classic Kraftwerk lineup: Mr. Hütter, Mr. Schneider and the electronic percussionists Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos. (Five of the remastered albums are also available individually.) Like Mr. Hütter’s infrequent interviews, “The Catalogue” doesn’t divulge much that fans don’t already know. There are no liner notes, no unreleased tracks, no digital mini-documentaries, just some additional photos and revised album graphics.

The music, however, is much more generous. The remasters render Kraftwerk’s glistening, icy textures even more shimmering and crystalline, the repetition more entrancing. “Autobahn,” for example, welds a bouncy Beach Boys harmony to the hypnotic 4/4 motorik beat pioneered by the German band Neu! (whose Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother were part of an early Kraftwerk lineup) to create a 22-minute synthesizer symphony evoking a pleasant highway drive. (A three-minute edit of the song reached No. 25 on Billboard’s singles chart in 1975, the group’s only hit in the United States.)

“For the first time, I think the music sounds the way we always heard it and produced it in our Kling Klang Studio,” Mr. Hütter said.

After “Autobahn,” albums like “Radio-Activity” (1976) and “Trans-Europe Express” (1977) further refined the group’s experimental pop sensibility. Borrowing from the German tradition of sprechgesang, or spoken singing, Mr. Hütter’s flat, affectless voice — sometimes treated with a vocoder to further dehumanize it — is an odd match for the band’s lilting music-box melodies. “What I try to do on the synthesizers,” Mr. Hütter said, “is sing with my fingers.”

But for some critics the group’s synthetic songs just didn’t compute. “Fun plus dinky doesn’t make funky no matter who’s dancing to what program,” Robert Christgau wrote of “Computer World” in The Village Voice. “Funk has blood in it.”

Such distinctions didn’t seem to matter to club crowds: New York’s downtown scene embraced the group. François Kevorkian, a D.J. at underground clubs in the late ’70s and early ’80s, would use Kraftwerk to blend tracks by Fela Kuti and Babatunde Olatunji into his sets. “What was really remarkable was that their music was getting played just as much at Paradise Garage as it was getting played at the Mudd Club, and there were very, very few records that had that ability to cross over between all the different scenes,” said Mr. Kevorkian, who would later work with the band on its “Electric Cafe” album. “Kraftwerk was, like, universal.”

Kraftwerk had long been a staple of the D.J. sets of Afrika Bambaataa in the South Bronx, and in 1982 he and the producer Arthur Baker decided to combine the melody from “Trans-Europe Express” (which Mr. Baker had noticed kids playing on boom boxes in a Long Island City, Queens, park) and the rhythm pattern of “Numbers” (which Mr. Baker had seen wow customers at a Brooklyn record store). The result was the pioneering 12-inch single “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force.

“I’m trying to remember a record that created that much mayhem on the dance floor when it first came out, and I can’t,” Mr. Kevorkian said of the reaction to “Planet Rock.” Most early hip-hop songs were slow, “from 90 beats per minute to 110,” Mr. Bambaataa said. “We went to 130 beats per minute, and from that came Latin freestyle, Miami bass and all that.”

“All that” encompassed an entirely new genre, electro, which paved an alternate route for hip-hop. It’s hard to imagine the productions of Timbaland or the Neptunes without the innovations of “Planet Rock,” and its repercussions can still be heard the world over, from Bay Area hyphy to Brazilian baile funk.

The roots of techno wind their way back to Düsseldorf too. In Detroit the radio D.J. Charles Johnson — better known as the Electrifying Mojo — built a fervent following on the urban contemporary station WGPR-FM in the late ’70s and early ’80s by ignoring the rigid formatting of other local stations. He had fished a copy of “Autobahn” out of the discard bin at a previous station and soon acquired a copy of “Trans-Europe Express.” “It was the most hypnotic, funkiest, electronic fusion energy I’d ever heard,” Mr. Johnson said. Kraftwerk became a staple of Mojo’s show “The Midnight Funk Association.” When “Computer World” came out, Mr. Johnson played almost every song on the album each night, making a lasting impression on a generation of musicians.

“Before I heard ‘The Robots’ I wasn’t really using sequencers and I was playing everything by hand, so it sounded really organic, really flowing, really loose,” the Detroit D.J. and producer Juan Atkins said. “That really made me research getting into sequencing, to give everything that real tight robotic feel.”

Over the next several years Mr. Atkins, along with his high school friends Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, would become the pioneers of techno, which Mr. May once famously described as being “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”

Techno would eventually explode internationally in 1988, with raves in London and trance in Goa, India. Back in Detroit, “Computer World” would assume the status of a sacred text. Kraftwerk was “considered like gods,” said Carl Craig, a Detroit techno producer. “Black people could relate to it because it was like James Brown. It was just this kind of relentless groove.” Mad Mike Banks, founder of the Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance, said he considered the song “Numbers,” from “Computer World,” the “secret code of electronic funk.”

“That track hit home in Detroit so hard,” Mr. Banks said. “They had just created the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in.”

For Kraftwerk it’s a civic connection that has come full circle. In the last decade Mr. Hütter has developed relationships with some Detroit artists he inspired, including Mr. Banks. It seems to be a kind of “brotherhood, like Düsseldorf and Detroit,” Mr. Hütter said, saying he’s fascinated “that this music from two industrial centers of the world, with different cultures and different history, suddenly there’s an inspiration and a flow going back and forth. It’s fantastic.

“All this positive energy, this feedback coming back to me, is charging our battery, and now we’re full of energy. It keeps my Ralf robot going.”

Indeed, compared with Kraftwerk’s near invisibility throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s, the last few years have seen a relative flurry of Kraftwerk activity. Laptops have allowed the group to take its Kling Klang Studio on the road, so it has been touring regularly, adding 3-D graphics to the live show this year. Now that “The Catalogue” is completed, Mr. Hütter has promised a new Kraftwerk album soon, which would mark the band’s first recording without Mr. Schneider. If Mr. Hütter has any reservations about working without his musical partner of four decades, he kept them to himself; perhaps robots are incapable of showing emotion?

“There’s so much to do,” Mr. Hütter said. “I feel like we are just starting.”